Brown Bag Lecture: “Using Photography to Teach about the Harlem Renaissance”

In 2014, Southern Studies alum and former Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) oral historian Amy C. Evans returned to her hometown of Houston, Texas, and reignited one of her passions: art education. She quickly aligned herself with Literacy Through Photography, a 25-year-old non-profit that places working artists in classrooms around the city to implement the organization’s unique, cross-disciplinary approach to teaching and learning that combines visual literacy training, photography, and writing. One of Evans’s first residency assignments was in a fourth-grade classroom at Kashmere Gardens Elementary School.

“I always try to meet students where they are, so for this group of predominantly African American students, I showed them images by black photographers and of famous African Americans,” Evans told The Southern Register recently. A longtime fan of the work of Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten, Evans used his portraits of Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Fitzgerald, James Baldwin and others to not only expose her class to Van Vechten’s style of portraiture, but to an important time in America’s cultural history. Students read poems by Langston Hughes and listened to songs by Ella Fitzgerald. They wrote about how Van Vechten’s portraits of these artists communicated emotion through the use of color, pattern, and the sitters’ facial expressions and body language. They talked about what it is like to visit a photographer’s studio and the culture of Harlem in the 1930s and ‘40s. They ook note of the fabrics that Van Vechten used as backdrops for his portraits and discussed how Van Vechten, who is was white, came into contact with so many luminaries of the time period.

Their first photography assignment was to take pictures of each other, using digital cameras provided by LTP. They used the resulting photographs to create collages in Van Vechten’s style, using decorative papers in place of his colorful backdrops.

For their final project, Evans set up a photography studio in the classroom, where students sat for formal portraits in the style of Van Vechten. They were asked to envision their future selves, using costume props, various fabric backgrounds, and body language to communicate their visions.

Brown Bags happen select days during the school year at noon in Barnard Observatory.